Anonymous Industrial Walkabout

The Devil’s Mouth (2026)

No need for a deep dive into The Devil’s Mouth, there’s not much to see.

Five easily forgotten college friends take a break from soaking up Thailand’s breathtaking scenery to follow a guide into a series of partially submerged caves currently inhabited by a very hungry shark.

I smell a bad Yelp review.

Blonde beauty Sara (Kathryn Newton) is miffed at her friend Max (Lana Condor) for being an irresponsible party princess. Max wanders off at one point, forgetting to tell anyone that Sara is swimming and not on the boat.

So poor Sara watches her pals sail off into the sunset while she’s mugged by a gang of rogue jellyfish! The kids recover and retrieve her, but she’s rightfully pissed at Max, even though the latter is paying for the trip.

This is director Jeff Wadlow’s only attempt at character development, so please take note.

Somehow this passel of feuding tourists end up underground, snorkeling their lungs out in search of an exit soon after their guide detects the unmistakable signs of a maneater in the house: a pool of fresh blood and a scuba mask that’s got two huge tooth holes in the face.

The cave decor is sufficiently rendered as to produce a measure of anxiety that is desperately needed in The Devil’s Mouth.

The shark, clearly some sort of prodigy, thrives in a mixture of salt and fresh water and instantly adapts to hunting prey in a cave, ramming the limestone to knock trembling swimmers into his watering holes.

It can also leap and jump like a porpoise, pivot its head, and swim backwards.

Not to give away too much plot, but after watching a ravenous predator make a picnic out of a half-dozen humans in less than 24 hours, and continue to hammer away at the geology trying to get Max and Sara into its belly, one can only conclude that the shark has a severe eating disorder.

In any case, the size and scale of the shark fluctuates along with viewer interest. In The Devil’s Mouth, entertainment is chiefly derived from watching hapless nitwits get chewed upon, but there’s nothing noteworthy happening (apart from magic shark antics) to keep us afloat or awake.

We’ve been on this vacation. Bring a couple good books.

Horror Castle (1963)

Get used to the sight of Mary Hunter (Rossana Podesta) wandering the grounds of a gloomy castle in a blue nightgown, accompanied by a heavy handed James Bond-style jazz score that erupts whether the scene calls for embellishment or not.

Welcome to Horror Castle, aka The Virgin of Nuremberg, directed by versatile veteran Antonio Margheriti (Castle of Blood, The Long Hair of Death, Cannibal Apocalypse).

Mary, the new bride of Max Hunter (Georges Riviere), moves into his family’s ancestral estate in Germany, an imposing edifice loaded with bad juju, thanks to the legacy of Max’s maniac ancestor, The Punisher, who tortured local girls he suspected of sinful behavior.

In straight Rebecca fashion, Max has business elsewhere for much of the movie, leaving Mary in the care of Erich (Christopher Lee) a scarred and taciturn family retainer, and Martha (Laura Nucci) the morose, stoned-faced housekeeper.

If you’re one of those folks that can’t get enough gothic atmosphere and macabre accoutrements, Horror Castle is littered with skulls, secret passages, and vintage torture devices that are still kept in fine working order.

It’s a bit of a stretch, but Marheriti tries to make a case for the monster of the house, a sadistic freak skulking about in executioner garb (Mirko Valentin) being a sympathetic character, since he was himself disfigured by fiendish Nazi surgeons to resemble a skull.

However, eliciting pity for a guy that stuffs a woman into an Iron Maiden, and torments another with a hungry rat loosed on her face is a mighty tall order.

Maybe next time.

I wish Horror Castle rated a definitive restoration, because the version I saw had been heavily edited and dubbed in English to the point of absurdity. Even so, it’s a tingly tour in a creepy ass location, with the enchanting Rossana Podesta guiding us by candlelight.

Trust me, there are worse ways to spend a dark and stormy night.

If you can handle the rough edges of budget constraints and decaying filmstock, Horror Castle sustains an eerie charm, with all its roads leading straight to the torture chamber.

Watch your step!

The Barge People (2018)

London filmmaker Charlie Steeds is earning a reputation as a British Roger Corman, grinding out low budget shockers with machine-like efficiency, as we saw in Freeze, his community theater version of a doomed polar expedition.

In The Barge People, Steeds crams scraps and trimmings from Wrong Turn, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Humanoids From the Deep, and The Hills Have Eyes into a Turducken tale of hungry amphibian mutants living in the nasty waters of England’s canal boat system.

Kat (Kate Davies-Speak) and her sweetheart Mark (Mark McKirdy) rent a canal boat for a bucolic weekend with her sister Sophie (Natalie Martens) and toffy-nosed boyfriend Ben (Matt Swales).

It doesn’t take long for snobby Ben to rub everyone the wrong way, including a feral couple living on their own barge that gets sideswiped thanks to Ben’s nonexistent navigation skills.

Before we can settle into a rousing chorus of Dumb City Kids vs Rural Ruffians, a pack of scaly predators board the tiny ship and start gnawing away on everybody in sight.

This forces Kat to strike up an uneasy alliance with Jade (Makenna Guyler), one of the boat invaders, to rescue Mark from captivity, that’s undermined by their mutual distrust of each other’s social class.

“I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth,” Jade sneers. “You’re on your own.”

When confronted with a boatload of hostile monsters, Ben somewhat whimsically offers to buy them off with a deposit of $5,000 pounds into their bank account.

Ben didn’t get the assignment.

Once again, Steeds manages to offset his lack of funds with a commitment to create something reasonably fresh, and the timeless wonder of the English countryside helps considerably.

The Barge People features vegetarian gore, with not much meat to go with all the sauce, but serves as another reminder that no one should ever go anywhere for a relaxing weekend, other than back to bed.

Stay at home and read a book. You’ll live longer.

Wind and Bone (2024)

The problem with Algonquin cannibal spirits is they never know wendigo.

In Wind and Bone, budget-conscious filmmakers Michael Tuthill and Kevin Troy drop us in the wild woods of West Virginia, where a carload of reasonably attractive campers decide to pick up Sierra (Julie Kashmanian), a reasonably attractive hitchhiker stranded in the middle of nowhere.

Lacking any sort of excuse, Sierra accepts an invitation from Alistair (Eric Henderson) to join his friends at a nearby cabin in the woods to celebrate a possible proposal from alpha dickhead, Jeff (Joshua Cody) to April (Alex Cody).

Along for the ride is Curtis (Guy Wellman), a Native American guide, who’s only there for seasonal work, and proves to be less than capable when the company is marked for destruction by a local legend that feeds on pain and misery

“I thought you were supposed to be an expert tracker,” Jeff growls.

“I’m from the Burbs, bro,” Curtis confesses.

Let the body count commence!

Only Sierra, the stranger in their midst seems to have the fortitude to fight back, as her newfound camping buddies succumb to a host of attacks by the creature itself, and each other under the wendigo’s malign influence.

Tuthill and Troy wisely elect to go with practical creature effects, pasting an elk-horn helmet on a handy stuntman as a reminder that there is, in fact, a monster on the loose. Periodically we hear it whispering in the trees.

Yes, West Virginia, there is a wendigo.

There are antlers all over the place in Wind and Bone, hanging from trees and peeping around the shrubbery. Thanks to the success of The Ritual, based on the Adam Nevill novel, antlers have become the ubiquitous symbol of folk horror, much like tentacles indicate the presence of Lovecraftian cosmic horror.

Wind and Bone is not nearly as good a movie as The Ritual, but it’s good enough for a fast folk horror fix.

Undertone (2026)

Curses! Foiled again!

The debut of Canadian filmmaker Ian Tuason, Undertone is unsettling entertainment that hopefully frightens everyone into not opening anonymous attachments to their email.

As it turns out there are much worse things than viruses out there and all the Norton Utilities in the world won’t fix them.

Evy (Nina Kiri) cohosts a paranormal podcast with her friend Justin (Adam DiMarco) while looking after her comatose mother (Michele Duquet) upstairs. Thus we have the key ingredients for a very creepy and crumbly cake and newcomer Ian Tuason gets it in the oven for a torturous slow bake.

Evy and Justin play a series of audio files throughout Undertone’s 94-minute runtime that get increasingly more disturbing, detailing a young couple’s entrapment by an Old Testament demon that preys on newborn children.

Isolated and on the outs with her boyfriend, Evy, a skeptic by nature, begins hearing strange things, her home seemingly infiltrated by the evil audio.

Tuason lets his camera wander freely around the house, occasionally keeping Evy in the frame at a watchful distance. She often turns and looks around, sensing another presence, but there’s no one there.

Filmed on a measly half-million dollar budget, Undertone isn’t popping with CGI or gallons of guts. It’s a slow burner that applies steady pressure, infecting protagonist and viewer equally with a subliminal menace, and it’s well worth your time.

Pro tip: If a recording of a demonic summoning comes up on your playlist, skip that track. Do not play it out loud especially if you have a ton of unresolved guilt issues, like Evy.

Nothing good will come of it.

Across the River (2013)

Reasons for not writing reviews:

Sometimes the words ain’t flowing. Try as I might, nothing comes to mind other than regret for wasting a day off on poor quality entertainment.

On other occasions I may surf until my hand cramps and end up watching nothing—none of the pithy descriptions inspiring even a tentative look.

Not to put too fine a point on it folks, but it can be a chore to find source material worthy of extended coherent thought.

So it’s been a minute or two. My sincere apologies.

Like a desperate angler, though, I’m happy to report I finally hooked a specimen that warrants further study, an eerie Italian curiosity called Across the River, written and directed by Lorenzo Bianchini.

Warning! Even for a slow-burner, this one is real pokey. My advice is to stick with it, because there are treasures to be uncovered, and Bianchini succeeds in capturing a number of creepy scenes.

Biologist Marco Contrada (Marco Marchese) is hunkered down in a remote forested area near the Slovenian border, gathering data about the nocturnal habits of wildlife.

Marco duly checks and repairs his trail cameras, making recorded observations along the way, and eventually succeeds in strapping a small camera to a captured fox.

Whilst tracking the fox, the curious scientist stumbles upon an abandoned village littered with the remains of gruesome animal kills that appear to be alarmingly recent.

Across the River is rock-solid on mood and atmosphere, as Marco, the clinical observer becomes the one being watched by a pair of malevolent beings.

Bianchini makes use of minimal color adjustments throughout, with darkness having the rich, impenetrable quality of a nightmare from a past that threatens to envelope the hapless scientist.

The inky black and white footage is broken up by splashes of red, both blood and viscera, as Bianchini blends horrible history with present peril into a limbo of the lost.

I want you to watch Across the River and revel in its cursed landscape. It’s a film that grinds slowly, but surely, on a memorable mission to mess with your mind.

Life (2017)

Less.

Lifeless would be a more accurate title.

Even with Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ryan Reynolds attached as astronauts in distress, this one never reaches orbit, and instead achieves only minimal trajectory.

Six crew members on the International Space Station discover a single-cell organism among recent samples from Mars. What starts out as a wondrous moment, the meeting of intelligent life forms, quickly becomes another bug hunt, when everyone freaks out.

The astronauts get popped off one by one, as the rapidly adaptable alien known as Calvin, decides the crew is expendable.

The creature effects are decent, giving Calvin a gliding tadpole-starfish-octopoid fluidity through the thin atmosphere as it chases down its prey.

Unfortunately, it’s not frightening, so there’s little tension at play, even as the two survivors race for the escape pods on a space station that’s set for self destruction.

As silver linings go, Life is at least good to look at. The modeling and effects techs do a bang-up job. The International Space Station registers strongly as both a vast and miraculous piece of technology, and a potential tomb that’s getting smaller all the time.

To his credit, director Daniel Espinosa handles the effects deftly, but the script by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick is a lemon, unfolding in all-too-familiar fashion—with one exception.

The end of Life is not a happy one. Is it worth sitting through the rest for a mighty grim payoff?

I’m trending negative on this issue.

Scathing (2016)

Perhaps Florida filmmaker Joseph Mazzafero was anticipating negative reviews?

I actually saw Scathing several years ago but somehow the memory didn’t burn bright enough for me to recollect, whilst sifting through Tubi’s generous inventory of low-budget indie horror.

Rebellious teen Amanda (Allie Sparks) is lured out of her house at 3am by horny boyfriend Adam (Michael Frascino) and driven out to a secluded petting spot for an all-night make-out sesh.

Upon awakening, still knackered from too much tonsil hockey, they discover that the car won’t start, so Adam calls his buddy Steve (Chris Shepardson) to come and fix it.

Steve soon arrives with Daisy Duke-clad Stephanie (Paola Duque), and after declaring Adam’s car “a piece of shit” proceeds to get stoned and tell a long stupid joke about a cat.

The cast is then set upon by a very tall, long-haired dude in a welder’s helmet (John Kyle), who makes short work of Steve and carries Stephanie off to the wood shop for some sicky-icky torture porn that culminates in a spike through the forehead.

While the killer takes Stephanie apart, Adam and Amanda await their turn locked in the car. For like three days. No food, no water, no pee, no poop.

The idea that the maniac might return at any moment causes paralysis of the mind and body, apparently. Couldn’t they have just run for it?

Too risky, I guess.

Adam finally grows a spine and steps out of the car—and is immediately taken by the towering weirdo back to the shed for an extreme vasectomy, the results of which are proudly displayed by the giant to the gawking Amanda.

There are plenty more lurid twists afoot in Scathing, and you can find them in Wrong Turn and Psycho. Here then is a buffet of bone basic brutality, that includes a baby in the microwave, with a WTF ending that doesn’t clarify shit.

Does the killer get away? It doesn’t matter, because you won’t.

What Lives Here (2024)

Nice to have something to fall back on.

What Lives Here, a gore-strewn bloodbath about a hapless moving company hired to clear out a haunted house, is co-written (along with his wife Michele), directed, and starring New Jersey construction boss Troy Burbank, who deserves mention alongside other inspired dilettante filmmakers.

I can’t help but think of Harold P. Warren, the Texas fertilizer salesman responsible for Manos: The Hands of Fate, for instance, or welder Anthony Cardoza partnering up with Coleman Francis to make stupefying entertainment like The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961) and Red Zone Cuba (1966).

For a paltry $25,000, Burbank and a bunch of his friends filmed in and around the Strauss Mansion in Atlantic Highlands for 10 days and the result is What Lives Here, a movie that takes its sweet time about getting anywhere, but erupts with enough bloody mayhem to justify its existence.

There is a story here, about evil twins escaping from a mental hospital and taking up residence in the very house that Lee Duncan (Jeff Swanton) and his band of blue-collar boobs are scheduled to clean out.

But let’s not rush into anything. First, Duncan and his men have to drive from Pennsylvania to New Jersey for the job. This means stopping at a crummy dive bar to eat cheeseburgers for like eight minutes.

One character uses this opportunity to “go take a piss.” And the camera follows him!

Then they arrive at the mansion, and immediately leave again to go get something to eat, leading to another long sequence of beer drinking and crap dialogue.

Meanwhile, a delivery man and a nosy teen stop by and fall victim to one of the murderous grannies running amok in the old house that also very obviously serves as a local historical society, since there are glass display cases and newspaper clippings in every room!

The movers themselves and the Barfly Bettys they meet at the second bar and bring home to be eviscerated, are beer-swilling, working-class zeroes that have nothing on their minds but sex, food, and a paycheck, by gawd.

In other words, easy pickings for old ladies in their nightgowns. Indeed, the deaths carry What Lives Here, as the makeup effects of bodies being hammered, stabbed, and sliced, are actually worth sitting through the abundant blue-collar B-roll.

Even a construction boss director knows you’ve got to deliver the gross goods, or get outta the horror business.

Outpost (2008)

Somewhere in Eastern Europe, government forces are battling insurgents in an unending cycle of carnage.

In Outpost, Hunt (Julian Wadham), a determined financier employs mercenary captain DC (Ray Stevenson) and a band of “hired swords” to accompany him on a hazardous mission to retrieve a piece of Nazi hardware from an underground compound.

Shortly after securing the site, the soldiers find themselves under attack by an unseen enemy, one that can seemingly appear and disappear at will, which makes for a very nervous company.

Meanwhile, Hunt has found his infernal device, risking life and limb to jumpstart an ancient contraption in order to control undead Nazi hordes that are rapidly regrouping on the ground floor.

“You said that that machine of yours was made to control them?” DC shouts at Hunt.

“Not control, contain,” Hunt says. “But they obviously got the maths wrong.”

Director and cowriter Steve Barker correctly understands that Germany’s rumored use of occult practices toward the end of the war is a well-stocked pond of possibilities, and makes the most of it.

After a slow start, Outpost gains momentum as the mercenaries realize they’re up against an opponent beyond their comprehension—an army of teleporting super soldiers that have held their position since the end of the Second World War.

Fortunately, they aren’t advancing. Yet.